[lbo-talk] yakking about the right

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Mon Apr 2 04:03:25 PDT 2012


Cassirer is not widely known because embedded in Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a critique of western episomology at its root ... that can't be dismissed. He links it with the breakdown of mathematics as a certain knowledge in Kant. What makes Cassirer so powerful is his command of philosophy in its absolute reason, which he shows it to be false---as an anthropomorphic production, a mythological system like its religious nemesis, a system of symbolic form, like many others.

I am trying to think of an example. This will make no sense, but it doesn't matter. Consider the possibility there are no Aristotlian Concepts. There are no objects of thought, only the processes of construction. We have no closure on the construction, only the navigation limited to the duration of thought. It evaporates and then reappears. What makes us appear as stable, are the cultural forms, the symbols we use

One of the great ironies for me was that Strauss was Cassirer's graduate student. A worse match can not be imagined. I am still not sure I know that Strauss profoundly didn't understand Cassirer. Of course he reacted in the absolute opposite direction, but that is not the same as understanding. There is a certain competition, but that is ridiculous. You can not match Cassirer's eridition...its a monument like Hegel and Kant. I don't know how he did it. Speed reading?

A note of caution. Cassirer's most popular works Language and Myth, Symbol, Myth and Culture, The Myth of State are popularized works meant to bring a general public awareness to his ideas. The deeper or more controversial ideas are buried in the long philosophical tracts of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. I'll try to summarize the basic idea. While there are different modes of knowledge between the arts, sciences, crafts, languages, and modes of understanding, there is no hierarchy and no greater or lesser

modes of understanding. This fundamental equivalence relation leads to an absolute relativity of values, constructs, and ideas. These are not arranged in a grade-able heirarchy, period.

In the extension, this is an anthropological democracy of being in the world, to use Heidegger's terminology.



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